Axis History Forum

This is an apolitical forum for discussions on the Axis nations and related topics hosted by the Axis History Factbook in cooperation with Christian Ankerstjerne’s Panzerworld and Christoph Awender's WW2 day by day.
Founded in 1999.

DavidFrankenberg wrote:The question is now : why democratic countries like UK and US used such horrible weapons whereas the war was over and there were absolutely no need of Dresden bombing, like Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was a warning launched towards the Soviets : "that's what we can do". A prelude to the Cold War.

You have a strange definition of "the war was over".
Probably more than 500,000 people would die between Dresden and the end of the war. In the battle of Berlin casualties were more than that.

DavidFrankenberg wrote:But Dresden as mostly composed of stone.

It was maybe 50% bricks and the rest was wood, straw, reeds. By today's standard those buildings were seriously crappy. Most of them were built in the nineteenth century. The newer, even those built by the Nazis weren't actually any better.

DavidFrankenberg -- Your source for the claim (at viewtopic.php?p=2091419#p2091419) that the USAF used napalm and the RAF used phosphorus in the Dresden bombing is merely your own conclusory notion (at viewtopic.php?p=2091492#p2091492) that napalm and phosphorus just had to be used because Dresden in 1945 was supposedly built mostly of stone, a claimed fact for which you again cite no source. This substitution of opinion for fact won't turn the trick here. You have already been warned about not providing sources for claimed facts, and our readers are growing irritated; as one report noted:

This is hardly providing a source as asked for, does nothing to prove his point or contribute to the discussion and is the reason Dresden and other 'stone' cities burned has been explained earlier in this very thread. If the poster was actually interested in an informed debate he would have read the thread and known this. This and other posts he's made on other threads seem to indicate he has little interest in informed debate but instead is pushing a particular ideological agenda.

And actually it was much easier to survive firebombing than an attack with high explosives.
No blast waves, there were always many places with no fire (because there was nothing combustible there), fire spread slowly so you had a chance to escape, and people in shelters weren't buried alive with rubble.

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